I thought he was going to say that he was spoken to by an invisible sky wizard that had laid down plans and rules for everyone, and if you don't follow his teachings, you will end up in a lake of fire, getting your ass probed by demons with pitchforks.

/Then i remembered that myth had already been done//back to the drawing board i guess

Bit'O'Gristle:I thought he was going to say that he was spoken to by an invisible sky wizard that had laid down plans and rules for everyone, and if you don't follow his teachings, you will end up in a lake of fire, getting your ass probed by demons with pitchforks.

/Then i remembered that myth had already been done//back to the drawing board i guess

So, and I'm not trying to hate or anything, is that show just Stephen Fry says stuff (and presumably gives people points)? Are the other panelists known people? I see a friend posting gifs of that stuff on Tumblr and I just have no idea what the show is "about" if anything.

calbert:sno man: That deck had never, it was a fresh deck when he started. 52! is a really really big number, and there is no way he shuffled it back into order in four or five shuffles.

Also in probability news, in 8 or 9 out of ever 100 alternate universes Romney won.

i think a lot of people here are missing the point.

it was not a magic trick.

it was not a fresh new deck when he started (the four of spades is on the bottom)

he did not shuffle the deck back into it's original sequential order.

his point was that the random end-order of the deck would be nigh impossible to duplicate.

That he said "this deck" isolates the math which is off the chart anyway. I missed the 4 on the bottom, so I guess he'd had a shuffle or two before the screen shot.Beyond that, reading is a skill you seem to have not apparently mastered.

RminusQ:So, and I'm not trying to hate or anything, is that show just Stephen Fry says stuff (and presumably gives people points)? Are the other panelists known people? I see a friend posting gifs of that stuff on Tumblr and I just have no idea what the show is "about" if anything.

i don't know what the show is about either but it beats the tar out of the reality shows we have in the USA. i'll take random interesting tidbits over morans who repo cars, morans who trace bail jumpers and morans who honey boo boo any day of the week. it breaks my heart to see what is on TV these days and it pisses me off that (at least in my area) we have to pay for a service or we get no reception whatsoever.

RminusQ:So, and I'm not trying to hate or anything, is that show just Stephen Fry says stuff (and presumably gives people points)? Are the other panelists known people? I see a friend posting gifs of that stuff on Tumblr and I just have no idea what the show is "about" if anything.

I think they are more famous on the other side of the pond. Everyone on the panel has been in something else. Even if only as a stand-up comedian. But I tell you, ever since I got hooked on QI, I have searched out anything that includes Dara O'Briain, David Mitchell or Bill Bailey. There are several people out there that have posted all the episodes they could back to the pilot. I have spent hours watching and re-watching them.

As for the clip, there were far better "Oh wow" moments they could have picked. But it was a fair introduction to factorials I guess.

TonnageVT:I really wish we had QI over here, and not some dumbed down American version (see: Top Gear), I mean the actual Stephen Fry show. It's absolutely brilliant and Farkers would love it especially.

Just because a probability is really, really small doesn't mean it never happens.

Of course it doesn't mean the event never happens. The event did happen - you saw it with your own eyes. Every time someone shuffles a deck, it ends up in an arrangement that has the probability of 1/52!, which is tiny. The point is, it's very very very very very unlikely to get one particular configuration when shuffling cards, even though you are guaranteed to get a configuration. (Unless you are terrible at shuffling cards and you drop them all over the floor, or light them on fire, etc.)

there are 52! (8x10^67) possible combinations in a deck of cards. he was simply saying that the probability of two identically random decks of card is ridiculously small. so yeah, it's not impossible, but it's so highly improbable you're guaranteed that any random shuffle will be a unique combination never achieved before.

too quantify it like he did, lets say there's 100 trillion galaxies, each with 100 trillion solar systems, each with 100 trillion people shuffling 100 trillion times a second... it would STILL take 25,000 years to go through all the possible combinations!